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Wednesday, 30 January 2013

The Outsiders (US) and Rumblefish are films which I really loved
and which came at a rather an impressionable age for me – late teens and hungry
for life and cultural experience.

I’m not sure why it didn’t occur to me to go and read the
books, but I didn’t.I suppose I’ve
always been more likely to see a film based upon a book I’ve read than the
other way around.

The good news for me with this read is that the images I
held from the film didn’t haunt my reading at all, the book doing all the work
on that score.

The Outsiders is a great title.It has roots in the way I felt when I saw the
film and, strangely, the way I feel about myself now.

It’s the story of gangs polarised by economic and social divides
told from the point of view of one of the poorer kids (ie Ponyboy the Greaser).

Ponyboy’s a great character.He’s immersed in the culture of the gang and its codes, yet he’s
open-minded enough to be able to rise above it and see the bigger picture.As he eventually discovers, everyone has it
tough in some way or another.

Through a logical progression of experiences, Ponyboy finds himself
in the hands of the Socs (the rich gang), hands which force his head underwater
at a fountain until his friend saves him by killing the aggressor.

Ponyboy and Johnny (the knifer) go on the run and there
follows an exploration of their values and the vulnerability of their situation
in life.

I won’t go any further regarding the plot.All I’d like to say is that it opens up
beautifully and even when it closes down it still leaves space for thought and
reflection.

You’ll probably know that the author was only a teenager
herself when she wrote the book.Sometimes it shows through and I wonder if I made any allowances for
that fact.I think the book’s also
written for a young audience of readers ready to explore the world and who want
to suck up life’s experience – I also wonder if I made allowances on that score.

I think that, in the end, it’s such a great read that I did
forgive it for any flaws or cracks in the way it’s written.It does force me to ask a lot of questions
about writing, too.

There are passages in The Outsiders that I’d want to be
editing or changing or taking out and there are rules broken here that I try to
stick to in my own work.And then again,
who the hell am I to be suggesting changes to this modern classic?The best thing to do with this book is too
leave it exactly as it is.

SE Hinton has done something very right in this tale.I was completely engrossed to the point of me
stir-frying vegetables with one hand and holding the book in the other because
I didn’t have it in me to stop reading when I should have.

I found myself fully engaged emotionally and loved the
characters and the setting.There’s
often a tension as the story moves forward that means that getting to the next
page or next chapter is essential.There
are questions that are asked and left hanging, there’s style and cool, there’s
the exploration of what it means to be part of friendship groups and of why
teenage boys sometimes do the things they do (even more impressive in a sense
that the author wasn’t one herself).

Above all, it’s the voice of the book that is utterly
captivation.It’s consistent and full of
wonder and bewilderment as a teenager’s might be.

When I was half way through the book, I was so happy in my
reading that I went to the computer and ordered a copy of Rumble Fish.By the end, I’d placed an order for That Was
Then, This Is Now.I think that says a
lot about the way I feel about the Outsiders, as it does that I can’t wait for
those books to arrive through the post.

Sunday, 27 January 2013

While most books take years to germinate,
it’s probably the case that most authors get their inspiration for a story from
one particular experience.

That was certainly the case with my debut
novel Ghost Money (US), a gritty crime
story set in Cambodia in the nineteen nineties.

It was August 1996, and I was working in
the country for several months as a wire service reporter.

Cambodia was a big story at the time. The
Khmer Rouge, who had butchered and starved approximately 1.7 million Cambodians
during their brief rule in the seventies, were still fighting from heavily
fortified jungle bases. The government was an unstable coalition of two parties
who’d been at each other’s throats for the better part of a decade and whose
main interests were settling historical scores and making money.

A couple of weeks before I had arrived Ieng
Sary, the former Deputy Prime Minister in the charnel house the Khmer Rouge called
Democratic Kampuchea, announced he’d split from the movement and wanted to
negotiate with the Coalition Government for amnesty.

He said he’d grown sick of fighting and wanted to end the war. A more
significant influence were reports Khmer Rouge hardliners under Pol Pot had discovered
Sary was skimming proceeds from gem mining and logging operations along the
Thai border, and were about to move against him.

Unknown to most foreign observers, the
Khmer Rouge has been splintering internally for years. Partly this was the
result of relentless government military operations. More decisive were
internal tensions over the movement’s direction and how best to divide the
spoils from the money earning ventures.

Whatever the case, both sides of Cambodia’s dysfunctional coalition
government courted Sary and his not inconsiderable military clout for their own
ends. Sary, meanwhile, used his position to stay one step ahead of a prison
cell. It was a bizarre, increasingly acrimonious game of cat and mouse. Meanwhile,
Sary’s actions had resulted in a spate of defections by Khmer Rouge across the
country.

For local and foreign journalists, this meant taking part in a series of
visits to various provinces organized by both parties in an effort show off the
Khmer Rouge defecting to their side. The first of these was organized by the
Cambodian People’s Party, the dominant Coalition partner, in control of the
country during the eighties.

We were told to assemble early one morning at Phnom Penh’s airport, next to
a huge Russian helicopter the army used for supply runs. We waited in the
baking sun for hours until the Russian pilots, notorious drinkers, turned up.
As predicted, they were unsteady on their feet after the previous night’s vodka
binge.

We flew for hours over an endless expanse of dense, arriving in a small
village. A collection of old men and young boys, many missing limbs, stood in
ragged formation in a clearing in the village. Nearby, lay a collection of
ancient, rusty machine guns and rifles. Hardly the well armed, battled hardened
veterans we were told to expect.

After a series of speeches we all piled back into the helicopter, along
with several dozen heavily armed Cambodian men of unknown allegiance. The
helicopter took, then veered towards the ground and felt like it was going to
crash, but pulled up at the last minute.

Within minutes the chopper had flown into a tropical storm. The journalists
clung to whatever they could as the craft was buffeted by rain and wind. At one
point it landed in a small clearing that had been hacked out of incredibly
dense jungle and our heavily armed guests disembarked, then continued our
journey.

This experience encapsulated a number of lessons about working as a
journalist in Cambodia I tired to inject into Ghost Money.

It was wise never to believe outright anything you were told.

It was hard to get to the bottom of a story.

A lot of weird stuff went on in Cambodia and still does. If you’re honest,
as a foreigner, you really don’t know shit.

Although I didn’t
realize it at the time, this situation profoundly influenced how I researched
and wrote my book, Ghost Money.

I was too caught up in the day to day
reporting of events and trying to make a living as a freelance journalist to
put much of a dent in the book. That didn’t come until nearly a decade later,
when one day I sat down and started reading through some old notes. In early
2008, my partner and I quit our jobs and moved to Cambodia for a year with our
then two year old. I freelanced as a journalist, did fixing work for foreign TV
crews and finished the first draft of my manuscript.

Ghost
Money is a crime story, but it’s also about the
politics of Cambodia the broken country that was Cambodia in the nineties,
about what happens to people who are trapped in the cracks between two periods
of history, the choice they make, what they have to do to survive.

Using the skeleton of a plot I’d developed
in the mid-nineties, the basic story of Ghost
Money, a private investigator searching for a lost businessman amidst the
chaos of the Khmer Rouge split, came quickly. My main character, an Australian
Vietnamese ex-cop recovering from his career implosion in Bangkok took a bit longer
to develop.

Even harder was trying to infuse the book
with the sense of uncertainty, confusion and at times, plain fear, that sometimes
characterised my time as a journalist in the Cambodia, but which is the every
day reality for most Cambodians.

What does it mean for the story and characters when your crime fiction is
set in a country where corruption and extreme violence
are regular features of everyday life and the term ‘criminal’ is often simply a
label applied by the local elite to anyone who tries to assert their rights?
For that matter, what does it mean when elements of the state itself that is
the major criminal actor?

How successful have I been? That’s for the
reader to judge.

Andrew Nette is a writer, film buff and pulp
scholar based in Melbourne, Australia. He is one of the editors at CrimeFactory. His short fiction has appeared in a number of on-line and print
publications. Ghost Money, is released through Snubnose Press. He blogs at
www.pulpcurry.com

Tuesday, 22 January 2013

Chuck Wendig writes like a tornado might – brutal force and energy
with the power to create havoc with the merest change of direction.

Having just finished his novel ‘Blackbirds’ (US), I feel like I’ve
passed through the storm, or even like I’ve been passed through the eye of a
needle (and at 13 stone, that’s not an image that should be possible).I’m glad to be at the other side now, but I’d
happily jump right back in there for seconds.

Mr Wendig clearly knows his craft.His work is full of baited hooks that look so
wonderful that they’re impossible to resist.This achieves the effect of making the act of removing oneself from the
pages something that’s very difficult.

Better still, he’s come up with an amazing premise – a girl who
has the ability to see a person’s death, something that comes to her through
the simple act of touching skin.I guess
that in itself that might not work, but throw in the fact that the she’s as
much a victim of fate as the subject of her visions and it becomes much more
complex.Thankfully Mr Wendig doesn’t
leave this situation alone and gently picks at it until he’s explored it
completely.

The seer is called Miriam.She’s a tough, rugged chick who lives on the road and feels she’s doing
well if she gets to sleep in a motel.

Miriam’s all prepared for difficult situations, as she
should be.In her bag, as well as her
all-important diary, she carries a can of pepper spray, a butterfly knife,
another can of pepper spray and a hand grenade.Most of these she’ll use at one point or another.

She’s using her power as a seer to take advantage of those
who will die soon.It’s a clever twist
that makes a lot of sense.

Things go to pot, or more to pot, when she meets a trucker
and discovers that she’ll be there for his last moments and that his last
moments will be with a murderous, bald man who seems keen to stab out his
eyes.This seed is planted at the
beginning of the book and will return as an ending, something that’s clear
early doors, yet there has to be a twist and it’s worth the journey to find out
exactly what that’s going to be.

I’m not sure I can think of a book that has so many unique
and poetic images.There’s a phrase on
every page, in every paragraph almost, that is so beautifully turned and
appropriate that it’s as if Mr Wendig has a genius form of Tourette’s
Syndrome.It’s amazing the way they
inhabit the page and more amazing that they’re entirely appropriate.These are not darlings that need to be killed
by the writer because, in a sense, they’re like a skeleton throughout the story
and they are part of the rhythm of this life.Even more impressive, the book feels like it’s been written in one swoop
as though the words have poured from the author without being engineered.

I wouldn’t really like to be pinned down as to the genre of
this novel.There’s the central fantasy
element, an on-the-road story with a buddy movie element, there’s crime, layers
of horror, comedy, poetry and philosophy.These all co-exist with ease.Thing is, and I think I mean this, it must be one of the quirkiest romances
that’s ever been written.

Yes, I reckon Mr Wendig’s really a sweet honey with a heart
of gold down there under all the warts and false-trails, a little like the
character of Miriam herself.

Regardless of which genre it might be, this is a book that’s
worth its weight in gold – witness the oily slicks of the rainbows reflected in
the blackbirds’ wings, I urge you.The
brilliant cover is matched and then some by the words inside, I promise.

A slight aside, I'd pick up the paperback if I were you; the cover really is something you'll want to have on your shelves.

I’ve emerged through this side of the storm, have been
completely emotionally engaged throughout, and here I sit too nervous to put
down my umbrella as I know this tale will follow me around for a good while
yet.

Sunday, 13 January 2013

It’s the middle of January and, unless something happens to
completely alter the law of averages, this is going to be among my top 5 reads
of the year.I can’t imagine enjoying
many more as much as I did this.

Heath Lowrance has written some great pieces of late and I’ve
loved everything I’ve read by him.Even
so, City Of Heretics is my favourite to date.

The story is tremendous.

It has an arc that is perfectly formed and a pace that is
always natural and never forced, like the author has allowed it to flow
naturally.

Crowe comes out of prison and ends up in Memphis to settle
some old scores.He’s hard as nails and
he’s absolutely ruthless.He gets
involved with the new gang-leader in town, a series of murders, a heroin
addicted cop, a mean detective called Wills, his ex-girlfriend, a gang of
church members with an Old-Testament view of the world and a freak show posse
who’d make anyone’s hair curl up and try and worm itself back into the scalp it
came from.

The characters are tremendous, right down to the bit part
players.

The setting is mouth-wateringly described.Try this on for size:

“There was a sitting room immediately to the right, filled
with the kind of overstuffed furniture that no one sits in and a Grandfather
clock that ticked away the seconds of life with all the compassion of a killer.”

The action moments are perfectly weighted; I wanted to skip
through them to find out who was going to end up OK, but the detail was too
impressive allow me to do that.

The roots of this are definitely in the best of the noir
heritage and Mr Lowrance has clearly read and absorbed many things that allow
him to use subtlety as an art form.

The plot fits together like a tightly fitting jigsaw.

There’s an ending to blow the reader away, too.

I loved it.Loved it
because it was so easy to read.Loved it
for the simplicity of the development.Loved it for the pure pleasure it gave off right from the beginning.

It is one of those books that don’t come around so often, a
novel that brings joy and pleasure because of the way it’s been written.

Brooding, fresh, dark, eventful, full of suspense and
tension and nigh on perfect.

Thursday, 3 January 2013

I've not made many resolutions, but I've decided upon one course of action as a writer. I'm going to spend much less of my time trying to tell folk about me and my work and I'm going to focus more upon the act of writing stories. It seems like an obvious thing, but I look forward to the change of direction.

Should you find me wandering too far from this path, please remind me of what I just said.

The irony of this is that I have a giveaway of 10 copies of Mr Suit over at Goodreads. This is only for UK residents as I can't really afford the extra mile on the postage. If you're interested, follow the link.

And now to the main event. A book review of a very good book. I hope to be focussing more on this side of books, too.

A young woman is awoken in the home of her recently departed
mother by a couple of teenage boys who seem to have a bone to pick with
her.Though it soon becomes clear that
they are picking the wrong bone, the woman finds herself in grave danger and
makes her bid for freedom.Sadly for
her, she doesn’t make it and the boys lose control as they stamp out all of her
facial features.

DS Alex Morrow is sent along to investigate.What the reader picks up from the early
encounters with Morrow is that she’s from a complicated working-class family,
that she’s no fan of her superiors and that she’s pregnant with twins.She also cares about her new victim and has
to fight with the men around her to get to see this as the murder of an
innocent rather than simply another paid-by-the-hour job.

The story unfolds wonderfully.

The teenage boy killers attend a private, very exclusive Scottish
school.Thomas and Squeak are soon
separated when Thomas leaves for home after his rich and infamous father has
committed suicide.Lars Anderson has
been losing the money of many in the recent financial crash, a crash that
impacts upon many in this novel.

Morrow encounters an old friend in the form of Kay, the
cleaner who once worked for the victim and her mother and continues to clean
for other families in the area.This
opens the doors to a range of complications which make rather uncomfortable
reading in a pleasure/pain sort of way. It's a relationship and a set of consequences that I particularly enjoyed following.

The resolution of the story is for you to find out.All I’ll say is that it winds up with a
growing sense of the need for justice and an accelerated desire to reach the
end and find out what that might be.There was no let down when I finally got there, just a perfectly formed
moment that I genuinely hadn’t expected, one that passes comment on a world
that so often doesn’t seem fair.

It is a police procedural, but it has a huge amount to offer
beyond that.The stories seem to me to
be about people and the way they are affected by crime as much as they seem to
be about the serving of justice, after all justice as offered by the legal
system will rarely have the power to redress the injustices of our society.

Mina has a great empathy with her characters.Seems to really see the subtle ways in which
they interpret the world and are formed by their experiences of it.Can paint detailed pictures of the lives of
her characters by sketching in minor details that are striking in way they
expose the inner workings of the people in this book.

She also explores identity in a number of ways.No one is as they seem, each person has a
life beneath the veneer of their stereotypes or the first impressions they
create.Class, religion, personal flaws,
successes and tragedies are all brought to the surface in a book that refuses
to leave human beings as two-dimensional items.

It’s a very engaging read that’s written with real skill and
feeling and I’ll definitely be reading more of Mina’s work in the future.Very good indeed.